In Azuqueca de Henares, not far from Madrid, Spain's first new car factory in more than 30 years has opened. Not by Volkswagen, and not by Stellantis. It is opened by Liux - a startup with 65 employees and a total of 16 million euros raised, some of it European money.

The product is called Liux Big and it is not a car in the classic sense. It is homologated as an L7e - a light four-wheeler category, somewhere between a quadricycle and a real city car. A 260-litre boot, a battery of 15 or 20 kilowatt-hours, a price under 18,000 euros before state subsidies. Sales should start in the first half of 2027, and the waiting list already holds over 7,500 people.

The most interesting part is not the price but the body. It is made from a biocomposite based on flax instead of standard glass-fibre-reinforced plastics. Flax was not chosen for sustainability marketing - it was chosen because the material can be separated and used again.

"When you build something, you have to try to preserve the integrity of the material and the components so that a second life is possible," says co-founder Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros. He and co-founder David Sancho frame the whole company around that - recycling, as Espinosa puts it, is not a concept from a laboratory.

But his sharpest line is the other one: "The idea of a European car does not exist." That comes from a man opening a factory in Europe right now to compete with Chinese electric vehicles entering the same cities at prices European manufacturers struggle to match. It is either a sober diagnosis or the best possible marketing for a company that wants to fill that gap. Probably both.

Who this is for

Not car enthusiasts. The average person on the waiting list is 55 to 60 years old and lives in a city. This is a vehicle for someone who drives to the market, to the clinic and back, and for whom four doors and three hundred horsepower are an unnecessary expense. Two more versions are planned - an off-road and a cargo model.

Projected capacity is 20,000 vehicles a year by 2030. For comparison, that is a quantity the larger Chinese manufacturers ship in a few weeks. So Liux is not trying to beat them - it is trying to find the slice of the market that is too small to interest them.

The question left open for every driver in this region: when will a car like this reach our streets at a price that makes sense, and will it arrive at all before the Chinese competition already spreading across Europe? So far, the small urban electric car here is more theory than showroom offer.